I’m pretty sure most people don’t spend the night before a weight loss competition shoving potato chips and a very large leftover slice of chocolate cake in their faces but then again, most people aren’t me.

This all started Saturday night at the good-bye dinner Husband and I had with my friend Naomi. Naomi is not her real name but it makes me think of her and giggle so she's Naomi in this story. Anyway, Naomi has been visiting us here in Nashville for six days giving me the much needed talk therapy my sadness required. While talked and talked and talked, we did lots about town; people watched, saw leaves changing on trees, listened to great music and ate some really, really good food.

We were relatively good on the food front, only eating one really big meal a day, but you can’t come to Nashville and not try all the different options so there was a lot of eating. And the food was very rich and fatty yummy stuff which was okay to eat because she was on vacation and a lot of drinking pretty yummy cocktails because we were on vacation with her. But, while we have been very conservative in our gluttony, the delicious meals haven’t helped our overall weight issues one bit. Which is why, over our dessert of chocolate cake and the biggest sundae in the world (I know!), Naomi and I were lamenting the weight we’d gained since getting married and Husband piped in and said I would lose weight if I did exactly what he said.

!!!

Husband is always saying things like that. We’ve been married almost ten years and he has yet to learn that telling me to do exactly what he says results in me doing the total opposite. “Waiter, don’t serve her anymore wine.” makes me order a whole bottle, get loud and rowdy, tell people what I really think of them and run into glass doors I think are open. And telling me what I can and cannot eat is like waiving a red flag in front of a bull. Once, when we were newly married, he tried to get me to do the Atkins diet with him. I lasted one day before I was hiding in the closet shoving illegal fruit in my face and stashing bags of potato chips about the house to snack on every time he left the room.

Anyway, somehow in all the back and forth between Husband and his righteousness and me and my stubbornness, we all agreed to a bet; whoever loses the most weight in a month wins. Naomi, all but dragged into this with us due to her proximity at the dinner table, is actually willing to play too.

The rules are this: we begin today, October 27, 2014. We can choose to lose weight however we’d like but it has to be healthy. Whoever has lost the most percentage of weight by Thanksgiving is declared the winner. The losers will each give the winner twenty-five dollars making Christmas a good one for someone.

Husband wanted the loser to be humiliated, dancing in their undies with a bear head covering their face but Naomi and I were having none of that! Mostly because years ago, Husband bet me he could finish the kitchen by July 1st and he didn’t. If he had won I was to have bought him a flat screen TV and if he was to have lost, he was going to get a vasectomy. July 1st came and went and Husband went and bought himself a flat screen TV and to this day, his little swimmers are still intact. If Husband lost – WHEN Husband loses this bet, I know he’ll never do the naked dancing bear thing so we settled for money being the prize.

Poor Naomi doesn’t know what she signed up for here.

And that brings us back to the cake I shoved in my face last night so that I would be able to start fresh today. The cake that was absolutely worth the scorn that Husband was throwing in my direction until about 3am when it still sat like a lump in my belly taunting me and giving me a freaky sugar nightmare where Rob Lowe tried to carjack me from the shiny red Ferrari I was inexplicably driving. That cake was a mistake – or so I thought until I weighed myself this morning and found myself quite a bit heavier than I thought I was. Now I feel that cake was totally good for the competition. In fact, I should have finished the bag of potato chips and the brownie...

If I can manage to stay away from tempting chocolate cake slices the size of my head and not listen to Husband taunt/forbid me into secretly eating every time he leaves the room, will be fifty dollars richer by Thanksgiving.

Of course, writing about chocolate cake has me craving chocolate cake… Yeah, this could go tits up by Tuesday.